iPhone spotlight: Northern Ireland’s entrepreneur Apps
The dark nights and cold weather may be upon us but it didn’t deter over 60 people from recently gathering in Belfast’s Catherdral Quarter Black Box to see the latest and greatest mobile apps created by Northern Ireland entrepreneurs.
The brilliant demos ranged from being a virtual rock god to racing galactic spaceships before coming back down to earth and searching for your next home.
Clearly there are high levels of imagination, ambition and technology saviness out there :
The Infurious Comic Book Reader
First up Philip Orr gave a great demo of their hit comic book app.
The Infurious guys have created a sophisticated engine that allows normal full sized comic book content to be displayed and read on the iPhone and iTouch.
The User Interface is really slick, making flicking through the screens both quick and easy.
It’s much more than simply rendering a series of graphics with the user being able to take the comic back to it’s component parts and see how it’s all put together. There’s clearly a lot going on underneath the hood.
Infurious started off with a cartoon of their own creation called “Murderdrome” which unfortunately fell foul of Apple’s own content rules but the engine gave the guys a great platform to build upon.
Back in May this year Infurious announced an agreement with NBC Universal in the states to mobilize the Heroes comic strips.
The Heroes Comic Reader combines the mobile app with an easy to use web based interface allowing NBC to upload content which is then published to the comic reader.
Aside from comics the guys are also exploring other possibilities to mobilize different types of content & services.
For more info visit www.infurious.com
Rock Out!
None of us were ready for the next act, errrr, I mean demo, when Adrian Campbell from The Design Zoo gave a performance worthy of Jimi or Axel.
The Rock Out app allows you to play a simplfied lead guitar on your iPhone/iTouch along to a backing track of your choice complete with crowd roars.
You may think this sounds very familiar to the popular series of music console games but the Rock Out guys have taken a different approach.
The app is completely free playing and the user interface focuses on musical notes & your own timing. Watch the demo video on www.rockoutlegend.com to get the idea.
Rock Legends are invited to upload their best solos to the website bringing an interesting social aspect to the game.
Future evolutions will allow players to jam together in a band over wifi & choosing a track from their own iTunes library.
The app is available now on the App Store launch at £0.59. Totally Rocking!
Galactic Racer
Next up Liam McGarry of Wee Man Studios showed off their Galactic Racer iPhone/iTouch game.
Set high above the atmosphere you pilot your craft around several stages in a championship race series. One minute you are dodging giant asteroids and the next thundering through celestial junkyards to beat your competitors.
The game has been over a year in the making with a heavy weight development investment into their own 3D engine. This is the first game from Wee Man Studios & Liam gave some great insights into getting the most bang from their limited bucks, technically, financially and marketing wise.
The app is due to launch very shortly and the guys have already begun the important process of building anticipation levels amongst mobile gaming sites and social networks, already rated by PocketGamer® as one of the Top 10 most anticipated iPhone Games of Winter 09.
More information:
Twitter: @WeeManStudios
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Post brought to you by The Northern Ireland Technology Blog
Courtesy of the author James Scott
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So there we have it – an absoloutely brilliant event right at the heart of Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter, what are everbody’s views on these Apps? Are they hot or not? 
Hot! Most definately – that comic book reader is slick!
Glad you like them
. Visit Nitechblog.com for some more great posts.
I love them!
Just some more Apps we can’t have on Android haha. They are HOT ! Grr, android is the future.
Hello, I have browsed most of your posts. This post is probably where I got the most useful information for my research. Thanks for posting, maybe we can see more on this.